Saturday, December 30, 2017

From November 3, 2017, through March 28, 2018, the Guggenheim Museum will present Josef Albers in Mexico, an exhibition illuminating the relationship between the forms and design of pre-Columbian monuments and the art of Josef Albers (b. 1888, Bottrop, Germany; d. 1976, New Haven). The presentation will feature a selection of rarely shown early paintings, iconic canvases from Albers’s Homage to the Square and Variant/Adobe series, and works on paper.

The exhibition also includes a rich selection of photographs and photocollages, many of which have never before been on view and were created by Albers in response to frequent visits to Mexican archaeological sites beginning in the 1930s. With letters, studies, and unseen personal photographs alongside works drawn from the collections of the Guggenheim Museum and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Josef Albers in Mexico presents an opportunity to learn about the least known aspect of his practice, photography, offering a new perspective on his most celebrated abstract works.

An artist, poet, theoretician, and professor of arts and design at the Bauhaus, Dessau and Berlin; Black Mountain College, Asheville, North Carolina; and Yale University, New Haven, Albers worked across the mediums of painting, printmaking, murals, and architecture. With his wife, the artist Anni Albers, he traveled to Mexico and other Latin American countries more than a dozen times from 1935 to 1967 to visit monuments of ancient Mesoamerica, which archaeologists were then excavating amid a resurgence of interest in pre-Columbian art and culture. On each visit, Albers took hundreds of black-and-white photographs of the pyramids, shrines, and sanctuaries at these sites, often grouping multiple images printed at various sizes onto paperboard sheets. The resulting photographs and photocollages reveal Albers’s innovative, if understudied, approach to photography and also underscore the importance of seriality within his overall body of work.

Albers’s collaged images also suggest a nuanced relationship between the geometry and design elements of pre-Columbian monuments and the artist’s iconic abstract canvases and works on paper. Several of the latter are titled after key sites in Mexico, and formal resonances between the two bodies of work become apparent, especially when viewed together as in the Guggenheim presentation. Albers’s embrace of pre-Columbian imagery may be considered within the complex and often-fraught history of modernist artists looking toward non-Western cultures for source material.

His work contrasts with that of the revolutionary Mexican artists with whom he met on his trips, including Diego Rivera. At the same time, Albers’s long-term commitment to studying Mexican art and architecture also positions him as a prescient figure in the history of post–World War II American art, when artists such as Donald Judd, Ad Reinhardt, and Robert Smithson looked toward ancient traditions with a new sensitivity and self-awareness.

A fully illustrated catalogue, with scholarly essays by Hinkson and Joaquin Barríendos, accompanies Josef Albers in Mexico. The volume also includes writing by Josef Albers and an illustrated map documenting the Alberses’ journeys. The legacy of education is a strong element of his practice and will be reflected in public programs, such as a November 18 workshop for educators on the color theory he developed within his seminal pedagogical project Interactions of Color (1964).

Thursday, December 28, 2017

The Nasher Museum of Art is proud to present The Medici’s Painter: Carlo Dolci and 17th-Century Florence,
the country’s first-ever exhibition of the remarkable paintings and
drawings by Carlo Dolci (1616-1687). A favorite of the Medici court,
Dolci was a celebrated and popular artist in his day, but his personal
and original interpretation of sacred subjects fell out of favor in the
19th century. The Medici’s Painter invites us to see this
artist with new eyes. The meticulously painted and emotionally charged
works that were carefully selected for this exhibition, from U.S.
museums as well as important private collections and major museums in
Europe, allow for a reassessment of an Old Master painter whose
reputation deserves to be restored.

Dolci was a precocious child, entering the workshop of Jacopo Vignali at
the age of nine. Very early, his extraordinary gifts as a painter were
discovered by Don Lorenzo de’ Medici and other powerful persons in
Florence, who recognized Dolci’s remarkable ability to render details
from nature, especially facial features and hands, as well as
complicated drapery. As a boy and throughout his life, he was called
“Carlino” (little Carlo), possibly because of his short stature and
humble character. He was also extremely pious. If not diligently
practicing drawing or developing his painter’s craft, he often could be
found praying in Santa Maria Novella.

“When it comes to the art of
painting, in the future the world would be less beautiful if every
century did not have its Carlino.” — Filippo Baldinucci, Notizie de’ professori del disegno da Cimabue in qua, 1681-1728

In 1632, when he was 16, Dolci opened his own workshop in Florence. One
of his pupils was Filippo Baldinucci, who would become the leading
connoisseur in Florence, and the author of the official biography of his
“beloved Carlino.” Unlike most of his contemporaries, Dolci refused
most commissions for large altarpieces and frescos. Baldinucci tells us
that, rather early in his career, Dolci vowed to paint only religious
works. A handful of portraits have survived, however, including the
exhibition’s dashing Portrait of Stefano della Bella, which
demonstrates Dolci’s skill in capturing the sitter’s personality as well
as every fold and ruffled edge of the multi-layered linen collar.

The Medici’s Painter also contains a rare still life,

Vase of Tulips, Narcissi, Anemones and Buttercups with a Basin of Tulips.
The Medici coat of arms in the middle of the gilded vase suggests it
was a commission he could not turn down. Dolci’s real desire, however,
and his spiritual mission, was to paint intimate depictions of divine
subjects that would inflame the faith of those who viewed them.

The Medici’s Painter gives us an opportunity to study
Dolci’s painstaking application of paint using ultrafine brushes, and
only a few bristles, or the concentration it took to make tiny details
look so real, as in the lace on the cloth beneath the Christ child’s
feet in the foreground of

The Virgin and Child with Lilies from Montpellier.

One of the first things visitors will notice about a Dolci picture is
his brilliant sense of color, achieved by his access to expensive
materials, such as real gold and ground lapis lazuli, which accounts for
the beautiful blues. There is often a high finish that gives the
surface a smooth, enamel-like quality.

Dolci’s technique was time-consuming and exacting. He was notoriously
slow, a perfectionist who might take as long as 11 years to finish a
canvas to his own satisfaction. Another habit contributed to the
inordinate length of time: According to his biographer, Dolci would
recite the litany Ora pro nobis (pray for us) between each brush stroke
and sometimes write inscriptions on the back of his canvas. The Medici’s Painter includes a fine example of such a canvas, so visitors can see Carlino’s tiny florid script.

“Dolci was an incredible colorist and an impeccable draftsman,” said
Sarah Schroth, Mary D.B.T. and James H. Semans Director of the Nasher
Museum. “Visitors will delight in his perfect rendering of hands and
faces — and will be dazzled by his colors, such as the intense blue made
from ground lapis lazuli.”

The Medici’s Painter is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, published by the Davis Museum at Wellesley College ($35, Yale
University Press). The catalogue was edited by exhibition curator Eve
Straussman-Pflanzer, head of the European art department and Elizabeth
and Allan Shelden Curator of European paintings at the Detroit Institute
of Arts.

The Medici’s Painter features essays by Straussman-Pflanzer and
other leading early modern scholars: Francesca Baldassari, Edward
Goldberg, Lisa Goldenberg Stoppato and Scott Nethersole. T

The Ashmolean 23
March–22 July 2018The Ashmolean will present a major exhibition of works by
American artists that have never before travelled outside the USA (23
March–22 July 2018). AMERICA’S COOL MODERNISM: O’KEEFFE TO HOPPER will
show over eighty paintings, photographs and prints, and the first
American avant-garde film, Manhatta, from international
collections. Eighteen key loans will come from the Metropolitan Museum
of Art, New York; and a further twenty-seven pieces are being loaned by
the Terra Foundation for American Art with whom the exhibition is
organised. Thirty-five paintings have never been to the UK and seventeen
of these have never left the USA at all.COOL MODERNISM examines famous painters and photographers of the
1920s and ‘30s with early works by Georgia O’Keeffe; photographs by
Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand and Edward Weston; and cityscapes by
Edward Hopper. It also displays the pioneers of modern American art
whose work is less well-known in the UK, particularly Charles Demuth
(1883–1935) and Charles Sheeler (1883–1965). On show will be major
pieces by the so-called precisionist artists.These include Demuth’s I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold
(1928, from the Met), the painting Robert Hughes described as the ‘one
picture so famous that practically every American who looks at art knows
it.’ Made in 1928 and dedicated to the poet William Carlos Williams, the Figure 5,
was one of a series of symbolist ‘poster-portraits’ which Demuth made
of friends and fellow artists. Consisting of an enormous, stylized ‘5’
that occupies the entire picture plane and painted in bold colours on
wallboard, the painting evokes new styles of advertising that were
multiplying in American cities in the 1920s – a remarkable anticipation
of Pop art later in the century.Another important loan is Sheeler’s Americana
(1931, from the Met) which has never been lent outside the USA. The
painting shows a traditional American domestic scene with Shaker
furniture and folk objects arranged in a near abstract composition – a
blend of modernist forms with a historical subject.

Other rare loans
include a painting by E.E. Cummings (1894–1962), better known for his
poetry;and Le Tournesol (The Sunflower) (c. 1920, NGA
Washington DC) by Edward Steichen (1879–1973) who destroyed nearly all
his paintings before dedicating himself to photography. The Sunflower was exhibited in Paris shortly after it was painted in 1922 and has not been seen in Europe since then.Dr Xa Sturgis, Director of the Ashmolean, says:

‘It
is an extraordinary privilege to borrow some of the greatest works ever
made by American artists for this landmark exhibition. The Ashmolean is
indebted to the Terra Foundation, the Met and other lenders for parting
with so many of their treasures. We are bringing together an
exceptional collection of paintings, photographs and prints - iconic
pieces that have never been to the UK before and deserve to be
better-known in this country. We will reveal a fascinating aspect of
American interwar art that is yet to be explored in a major exhibition.’

The exhibition looks at a current in interwar American art that is
relatively unknown. The familiar story of America in the ‘Roaring
Twenties’ is that of The Great Gatsby, the Harlem Renaissance
and the Machine Age; while the 1930s are known as the Steinbeckian world
marked by the Depression and the New Deal.This exhibition focuses on
the artists who grappled with the experience of modern America with a
cool, controlled detachment, eliminating people from their pictures
altogether. For some this treatment reflected an ambivalence and anxiety
about the modern world. Factories without workers and streets without
people could seem strange and empty places.CATALOGUE

America's Cool Modernism: O'Keeffe to HopperPaperback

Two works by Jacob Lawrence
(1917–2000) from his ‘Migration’ series, which is otherwise full
of characters, are notable for the absence of people. They express the
harsh experience of African Americans travelling north in hope of a
better life. What they found was often more frightening than promising.

Edward Hopper’s Manhattan Bridge Loop (1928) has a gloomy atmosphere with a tiny, solitary pedestrian whose walking pace is at odds with the bridge’s traffic.For others, this cool treatment of contemporary America was a
positive response - an expression of optimism and pride. Skyscrapers
and bridges become studies in geometry; and cities are cleansed and
ordered with no crowds and no chaos.

Louis Lozowick’s (1892–1973) prints
capture the energy of the city in curving sprawls and buildings soaring
into the sky; while Ralston Crawford (1906–78)

and Charles Sheeler
depict the architecture of industrial America – factories, grain
elevators, water plants – as the country’s new cathedrals, glorious in
their scale and feats of engineering, yet oddly emptied of people.These artists were also engaged in a conscious effort to develop a
distinctly American modernism, not derived from Europe but rooted in
American cultural tradition and the landscape. They drew a direct line
of descent from the simple utilitarian forms of Shaker furniture and
rural barns to the standardized, machine-made world of the 1920s and
‘30s. In painting and photographing these subjects in a commensurate
style – crisp surfaces, flattened perspective, linear purity - artists
and critics were revealing an essential attribute of the American
character – modernity.Dr Katherine Bourguignon, Terra Foundation for American Art and exhibition curator, says:

‘In
addition to the artists who are well-known in the UK, this exhibition
is an opportunity to introduce a European audience to important figures
like Patrick Henry Bruce, Helen Torr and Charles Sheeler; and
photographers of the interwar period including Imogen Cunningham and
Berenice Abbott. These artists were actively seeking to create art that
could be seen as authentically ‘American’. Decades before the Pop
artists addressed consumerism and the American character, artists in the
1920s and ‘30s were dealing with these themes in remarkably modern
images marked by emotional restraint and ‘cool’ control.’